This is a much-delayed post about my first visit to The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. It was also my first-ever Ed Ruscha retrospective, and really the first time I've seen so much of the artist's work at one time.

One of the most engaging exhibits I've seen was a surprisingly local affair. It wasn't at the Guggenheim or MoMA. Ed Ruscha and The Great American West was about a California-based artist and it took place at The de Young, which I've always thought of as a rather traditional California museum.

The show was a retrospective, featuring 99 works from different phases of Ruscha'a career. The massive Standard Oil Gas Station was there, the word paintings were there, even the artist books, photography, and the more recent prints and airbrush paintings were there.

I absolutely loved the show, and so did everyone I was with. Ruscha's a West coast pop artist, from The Cool School, but I've always thought he had a talent for minimalism. His works are full of humor and nostalgia, but so compositionally sparse that they always leave you wanting more.

While I was there, I also saw an amazing permanent Andy Goldsworthy piece, that's composed of just one long crack in the pavement leading into the museum. I know it sound somewhat esoteric, but it was a nice surprise, and very meditative, as his work usually is.

The last thing to mention is the observation deck, which I didn't even realize existed beforehand. You can see panoramic views of The Golden Gate Park, the city, and the Bay. It's a lovely feature of the museum and a great way to breakup a museum visit especially when all the pristine rooms start to feel antiseptic. Much of The de Young's exhibition spaces are below ground level and lack natural light, so a trip up to the observation deck offered a nice change of pace.

I just opened 2 new online stores the where you can purchase all kinds of products featuring my artwork. Check out my storefronts on Society6 and Redbubble. If you're not familiar, Society6 and Redbubble are art marketplaces, where you can buy unique products like t-shirts, home goods, and tech gear designed by independent artists. The products produced by Society6 are of seriously great quality, and best of all, you can get that cool all-over print shirt. The two stores offer different products, so check out both!

The following is a transcription of an artists talk by Summer Romasco, originally presented at The Battery on July 14, 2015.

I make art because I want to physically change the world around me. I want to make something out of nothing, or transform canvas and materials into images that viewers can then gather new meaning from.

The work in Happy in the End is about recontextualizing universal symbols, the ones that are so prevalent they are considered clichéd, in order to construct emotive visuals out of the commonplace.

While creating my latest work I was specifically thinking about the sublime, defined not by awe-inspiring beauty but by the feeling generated when experience surpasses the ability to comprehend. Rational thought is affronted and disrupted by this feeling, and I want to reflect this disruption in my work.

Some process shots of a new screen print called "Happy in The End." It's an edition of only 10 prints. Three-color print with hand-painted gauche leaves on watercolor paper. There are more skull prints on the way, so check back.

My current project involves poster-sized screen prints of a hand drawn skull. Since these are going to be a standard size I ordered some pre-burned screens from the guys over at Anthem, and they look beautiful. Like most artists, I'm somewhat obsessed with materials and tools, and emulsion coated screens with images burned onto them are no exception. They give you just enough visual information to start imagining the final prints at scale, yet there are enough variables (the substrate, the colors, the inks) and decisions left to make that I immediately want to get to work to find out what the finished pieces will look like.